Recording of surveillance scenes is commonly used to deter criminal activity and to assist in apprehending the person responsible for the crime. Inside of banks and stores, video cameras have been quite successful in assisting the apprehension, and therefore useful as deterrents. On the other hand, recorded surveillance in the vicinity of automatic teller machines has been less successful. The scene monitored by a video camera at an ATM is typically poorly lit for video/photographic purposes. The field of interest is typically back lit and/or underexposed in that the sun or remote lights adequately illuminate the background scene, but not the face of an ATM user or an attacker near the ATM. In bright sunlight, for instance, the camera automatic gain control (AGC) may reduce sensitivity below that which provides an adequate definition of a face near the ATM.
Even with additional illumination, it frequently happens that the video or photographic record will be overexposed, or underexposed, despite the use of AGC and reasonable illumination.
The problem could be solved by bright spotlights shining on the area where the ATM user (or other subject) would normally be while operating the machine, but this will make customers extremely uncomfortable, and sun-blind the user to the extent of making it difficult to read the prompts and indicia while using the machine, and difficult to see an oncoming attacker or other threat.